Category: Repeat

But there are times when attempting to innovate is the right thing to do:

You should attempt to innovate after you have stabilized your fundraising, optimized your fundraising, and expanded your fundraising.

Stabilize, Optimize, Expand, Innovate

Most small- to medium-sized nonprofits need to stabilize their fundraising.

That means getting your systems locked in so you know exactly what to do, when to start, how long it takes, and you get it done on time. (Most small nonprofits have work to do on this stage, in my experience.)

(Side note: this is why I’ve been saying “attempting to innovate.” Because when organizations attempt to innovate, they often come up with a) things other organizations have tried before that didn’t work, and b) new strategies and/or tactics that don’t work.)

To all you small nonprofits out there: let the big organizations, who have optimized their fundraising, spend the money to innovate. There will be some successes and some failures.

Then copy their successes.

The Real Trick

The real trick is knowing when to innovate.

In my experience, too many smaller nonprofits like the idea of innovating – of working on something exciting – more than they like the hard work of following best practices.

So they attempt to innovate when they should be following surer paths to success.

If a nonprofit follows best practices, it will raise more money.
If a nonprofit tries to innovate, it might raise more money.

And you want to know what’s really exciting? Raising
more money with less work. That’s what happens when you follow best practices!

“But wait,” I can already hear people thinking, “we’re small, we have to innovate. And regular fundraising is boring.”

Please hear me out: that line of thinking is what keeps many small nonprofits small.

First of all, you do not have to innovate. Your organization was started to do one thing: make an impact for a cause or group of people who need help. Not to make an impact AND create innovative fundraising.

Having the impact your organization was started for and creating innovative fundraising are two completely different things that require completely different skillsets. It’s highly unlikely that a small nonprofit will be good at both.

Attempting to Innovate is a Bet

Organizations that attempt to innovate are betting time and money that the results will be better than the results they could get from best practices.

Sometimes you win. Most of the time you lose. Best practices are best practices for a reason: they are proven.

In my experience, attempting to innovate is a bad bet for most small nonprofits.

Let the “big guys” innovate. Let the big guys absorb the costs of all the testing and failures that lead to breakthroughs. Small nonprofits should be following the known paths to success.

Try Proven Tactics that are New to You

Most small nonprofits confuse “trying new things” with “attempting to innovate.”

Should small nonprofits should try new things? Of course.

For instance, you could try to acquire new donors using radio. That might be new for your organization, but it isn’t innovation. It’s a proven tactic. There are known Cost Per New Donor amounts (around $100). There are known ROIs (around 1.1 to 1.3). There are known ways to make it succeed (have a great offer, tell stories, long form is more effective than short form).

The thing I want smaller nonprofits to know is that the Fundraisers Who Came Before You have tried almost everything. If you look around, they’ve figured out what tends to work well and what doesn’t. Lean into that set of knowledge!

And here’s the amazing thing; those Fundraisers Who Came Before You will share their knowledge! They’ll tell you what they did and how they did it. They’ll share the results. You can apply what they learned to your organization, to grow faster.

You just have to take the initiative.

The Good News for Small Nonprofits

There are things you don’t have to do. Things you can take off your plate.

And one of them is attempting to innovate.

There’s an incredible body of knowledge that’s been built up over the last 70 years for how to raise money effectively. Lean into that body of knowledge – it’s what I do every day.

Every once in a great while, attempting to innovate is the right course. It’s fun (and usually expensive).

But the majority of the time there are huge gains to be made not from attempting to innovate, but from taking what’s worked for other organizations and applying it to your organization.

You’ll save yourself a lot of time and heartache. And you’ll do more good faster.

Today’s
post is the fourth top-level lesson we’ve found that every organization in the
Mastermind needs to learn…

It’s simple… but it’s not easy.

The Three Things You Should Focus On

I realized that every organization we worked with needs to get better at these three things. And all of them saw immediate gains from doing so.

Over my career, I’ve noticed that the organizations who focus on doing these well see a lift of 15% to 20% in net revenue over the first year they focus here.

So read on if you’d like to see that kind of growth…

#1 – Communicate to Your Donors More – About What Donors Care About

It’s a fact: most nonprofits under-communicate to their donors. (To be more nuanced, most nonprofits under-communicate to their donors about what their donors care about.)

Just one example: most small nonprofits who send four appeals per year are scared to death that they will drive their donors away if they send another appeal or two. What those small nonprofits don’t know is that their donors also give to other organizations who are mailing twelve, sixteen or even twenty-four times a year.

If you literally don’t have the human resource capacity to be communicating more, that’s a good reason. But if the fear of bothering/offending your donors is causing you to contact them less, you need to stop fearing and trust in a) best-practices and b) your donors’ willingness to help.

And of course, you have to communicate with donors about what they care about. Most smaller nonprofits have a hard time with this, which is why they should…

#2 – Use Specific Offers

To smaller organizations, it’s counter-intuitive that highlighting a specific part of one program will work better than Asking donors to fund your mission or all of your programs.

But it works almost every time.

Most of your donors, most of the time, don’t want to know the whole picture. They want an easy way to do something meaningful that they understand.

A great offer gives donors what they want: it highlights a specific part or step of one of your programs (so it’s easy to understand), and it shows your donors how meaningful and important that step is.

#3 – Manage Your Major Donor Relationships

About nine out of ten organizations we work with openly acknowledge that they could do a better job with their major donors.

And for the organizations where we can spend a year or two helping them improve their major donor systems – their revenue growth is remarkable.

Investing in your major donor systems is an easy win. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it will sure feel like it.

15% Growth is Simple, But It’s Not Easy

To the smaller nonprofits out there: if you do the three things above, and do them well, you’ll see significant revenue growth.

Because there is no magic bullet. Here’s how John Lepp of Agents Of Good said it on Twitter:

“Charities are looking for a magic (technologic and demographic) bullet to solve all of their problems, and I’m sorry… it doesn’t exist. It’s the 1000+ small boring things you need to do that make the big difference.”

The three things above are the three most important “1000+ small boring things you need to do.”

We’re helping several organizations do them right now. And we’ll continue to post about what they do as they grow and grow. If you want personalized, experienced help, visit this page to learn more and fill out an application.

In
case you’ve never heard me say it before: Better Fundraising’s mission is to
increase the fundraising capacity of small- to medium-sized nonprofits. So we
give away as much of our field-tested experience and knowledge as possible.

There’s
no secret special sauce we keep just for our clients. We try to put every
approach, every piece of testing knowledge we can on the blog and into our
resources.

And
for the organizations that want to go deeper, we relish the chance to work with
you on your fundraising.

Regardless,
our hope is to be helpful. And our clients’ results at year-end prove that our
approach is working.

We’re
bullish on fundraising in 2019. Follow-best practices, stay centered on your
donors, and you can raise a lot of money to do a lot of good!

Tuesday we featured a guest post from @BradyJosephson with two proven tactics for how to raise more money using “vertical Integration.”

On the surface, Brady’s advice appears to go counter to my normal advice. Because when I’m asked, “How many times a year should I mail our donors?” I usually respond, “Two more times than you did last year.”

I know that sounds glib – but in my experience, it’s true for about 90% of nonprofits.

“Vertical Integration” is really, really smart

This is especially important for smaller nonprofits without big communications departments.

It’s the idea that you can communicate the same thing to your donors in multiple channels to take advantage of the power of each channel.

And I’ll add “take advantage of the different portions of your audience” that each channel reaches.

But the key here is to be repeating the same message across all the channels – just executing it differently depending on the channel.

Note to astute readers: vertical integration is the proven idea of repetition (repeating the same powerful messagemultiple times) updated for the modern era. In the past, not every org could use the mail, radio and TV. And that’s still true today. But every org can use the mail, the web, email and social. And they need to be integrated!

“Direct mail isn’t dead, and it won’t be for a while, but its upside is limited.”

This is both true and not true.

It’s true that, for all nonprofits across north America, direct mail response rates and donor acquisition is down.

But for smaller orgs who aren’t experts at direct mail, there is a massive opportunity for you. The organizations we work with are all seeing very large gains in revenue and donor retention from our work in the mail. It’s why we developed “Instant Appeals & Reports.”

Maybe I’ll put it this way: for most smaller nonprofits, direct mail is still the best investment for communicating with your current donors. You just have to do it well – which is something that’s generally not taught.

Facebook is a Thing

Facebook is becoming a big deal for many organizations.

The most effective way we’re seeing it used, without going into the data-nerd details, is to present your most powerful message to your existing donors again, about the same time they are seeing that message in the mail and in your email.

The goal is to show you what data to track, and then what to evaluate, in your fundraising.

Most small nonprofits don’t realize it, but every single thing they ever send to their donors is a test. It’s a test to see whether their donors respond or not. So these nonprofits are performing all these tests, and creating incredible data about what their donors like and dislike – and not paying attention to it.

My goal today is to give you a great start into what to track, and then what to evaluate, so that you learn as much as possible from all these fundraising experiments you’re performing.

And you’re not learning just for learning’s sake. You should be doing this because you will raise more money faster.

Example for You

Say you’ve sent an appeal letter at Thanksgiving for the last five years. If you track the right information every year, you will know which of those Thanksgiving appeals was most effective with your donors.

Then you can “repeat” and improve your best-performing Thanksgiving letter. That’s how save time and raise more money each year.

What We TRACK [LIST]

Here’s a list of the primary metrics we recommend tracking. (Of course there are more if you get into the details. These are the primary ones.) If you track these, you’ll be able to properly evaluate the performance of your main fundraising efforts…

Like I mentioned earlier, you can go waaaaaay deeper into metrics for all of these. But today’s post is for the organization that wants to really understand and evaluate their fundraising – so that they can get better faster.

What We Don’t Measure

Now, you might notice that there are several things that we didn’t recommend measuring:

Complaints

Board Member reactions

Program Staff feedback

Of course, if Board members and program staff spot factual inaccuracies, you absolutely need to take their feedback. But as for whether they like it or not, or whether they think it will work, or whether they would prefer that you use different words, we don’t measure that.

Why? They are experts on your organization and your cause. They know far more than donors. But your fundraising should be aimed at donors, not experts! Your fundraising should use words and concepts that motivate donors to give gifts, not motivate in-house experts to give gifts.

#donorlove is in the data

One of the best things a small nonprofit can do is to establish a culture of tracking and evaluating everything fundraising.

In my experience, the organizations that do that tend to grow faster. They tend to raise more money. They also tend to have stronger relationships with their donors. Why? Because paying attention to what donors respond to is a pure form of #donorlove!

We’ve been blogging all this month about “Repeating” the tactics and messages that work for your donors.

And earlier this month I brought up an important question: “how do you innovate when you’re in a culture of repeating what’s worked in the past? Because you have to innovate.”

I Was Wrong, That’s Awkward…

Let me begin by saying that I was wrong about something: you don’t have to innovate.

This might be controversial, but most nonprofits should not be innovating.

In my experience, the vast majority of nonprofits should focus on the basic building blocks of solid donor communications and fundraising before they try to innovate.

Most nonprofits should “learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist” (eternal thanks for that quote, Picasso). Most nonprofits should take advantage of the incredible body of knowledge that’s been built up over the last 60 years for how to raise money effectively.

Listen, if you’re raising less than $2 million per year, you probably shouldn’t be innovating. You should focus your time on fundamentals like getting good at Asking, Thanking and Reporting, getting receipts out on time, focusing your time on major donors, having a website that’s good at receiving & tracking gifts, etc.

For instance, say you’re currently sending out 3 appeal letters per year and have a newsletter that doesn’t raise money. My advice would be to send out 5 appeals per year and start raising money with your newsletter before trying something your organization has never done before.

Those are the “long cuts” to success.

Two Paths to Innovation

Ok. You’ve fostered a culture of Repeating: you repeat tactics that work, and you invest the minimum time and money needed to update successful tactics (and not a dollar or minute more).

Then there are two paths to innovation:

When you update your materials, work to improve We call this “incremental innovation,” and it’s what most nonprofits should be doing.

Try entirely new tactics. This looks like “launching a Facebook presence” or “trying telemarketing.”

Incremental Innovation

Here’s how you innovate incrementally…

As you update materials you’ve used in the past (e.g., your year-end appeal letter, or your fall event), you do your necessary updates and then ask, “Are there any tweaks we could make so that this works a little better?”

Not very sexy, eh? But it’s how most of the really successful fundraising programs got where they are today. Incremental innovation over time creates a fundraising program that predictably raises more money.

Try New Tactics (but Minimize Risk)

The big idea here is to try new things without putting large portions of your revenue at risk.

Here’s a perfect example from a couple years ago: a nonprofit that regularly raised $50,000 from their Year-End appeal letter decided to not send their letter. They chose to only send emails because email was so much cheaper.

The organization saved approximately $4,000, but raised $25,000 instead of their regular $50,000. Ouch.

Any time you are considering an idea that puts a lot of revenue at risk, your goal should be to minimize the risk as much as possible.

For instance, they could have sent the letter to their Major and Mid-level donors. That’s where about 80% of their revenue came from. That would have guaranteed 80% of the revenue ($40,000!). Then they could have experimented by doing an email-only campaign to the rest of their donors.

And you know what would have worked even better? Sending the letter to all donors, and then sending a follow-up letter, and emails.

When trying something brand new, we usually follow these three principles:

Determine the “minimum effective dose.” You want to figure out the least amount you have to spend in order to get a test with reproducible results. Maybe it’s a new Facebook presence where you need to spend 15 hours per week and $1,000 per month boosting posts. Maybe that’s a radio campaign where you need to spend $20,000 on spots to really know if the campaign is working or not. Whatever it is, do the research and figure out what you need to do to make your test a good test.

Have a budget and a timeline. Define exactly how much money and time you’re going to spend on a test. If you don’t have a specific budget and timeline, you’re at risk of over-spending, or getting out too early, or running into conflict because different people in your organization have different expectations. We see this all the time in donor acquisition. Starting to do donor acquisition is hard, and usually takes at least a year to really get going. If you know that but don’t say it, and someone in the organization thinks it’s only going to take 3 months, you’re in trouble.

Define success. You have to specifically define what success looks like. It doesn’t work to say “we’ve engaged our donors more” or “we’ve built awareness in our community.” You want to use specific metrics like “our retention rate will go up 2%” or “we’ll acquire 250 new donors.” Get specific. As Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I’ve watched a LOT of money get wasted on new initiatives where the results weren’t really measurable.

What’s Next for You?

Hopefully this helps you a) think about what you should be doing next to raise more money, and b) avoid the common mistakes many nonprofits make.

Now, make a plan and go get ‘em! And if you want help, get in touch. You can use our experience (from successes and failures we’ve learned from) to move your organization forward faster!

Today we have an appeal letter from a small organization that shows how to repeat the main message – and do so without sounding repetitive.

I’m highlighting this because the main pushback I receive when teaching nonprofits that their fundraising should be “more repetitive” goes something like, “We can’t do that; we will sound ridiculous.”

Here’s a simple rule for how you can be repetitive but not sound ridiculous: each time you repeat what your donor’s gift will do, add another reason to give today.

The letter below – written by a non-professional with our coaching – does a great job of it. Let’s take a look… (click the image to see a larger version in PDF format)

I want you to notice two things. First, look at how many times the main message of “you can feed one person for $12.50 a month” is repeated. I count five places in the letter itself, one in the headline of the reply card, and one in each of the gift ask amounts.

Then notice how the idea is repeated, but the phrasing is a little different almost every time, to keep it interesting. That’s the secret!

The Same, But Different

Let’s break down each mention to see how they say the same thing – but with different emphasis and different spicing:

In the large copy at the top of the page: “See how YOU can feed one person for $12.50 a month!” That lets the donor know, clearly and immediately, what their gift today will do.

5th paragraph: “Your generous donation of $12.50 will help begin the Thompson’s journey back to financial stability and security with one box of food.” That adds a reason to give: the donor’s gift provides a whole box of food, and that one box starts the beneficiary’s journey. That’s a great deal for $12.50!

Blue call-out copy: “What I got was so much more than a box of food.” That helps the donor know that the organization does so much more than just provide a box of food.

9th paragraph (in blue): “Your generous donation of $12.50 by July 15th will provide one person with 4 boxes of food this month.” The donor hears two more reasons to give here: that their gift provides not just one, but four boxes of food, and that there is a deadline by which they need to respond.

In the P.S.: “Just $12.50 provides 4 boxes of food to someone in your community who just needs a helping hand to get back on their feet!” This reinforces what the donor’s gift will do, and frames it as a way to “give a helping hand to help a person get back on their feet again.”

What the donor’s gift will do is clearly described in the beginning of the letter. Then each subsequent time it is repeated, another reason to give today is added.

>>> What could have felt repetitive instead feels really helpful to a donor. <<<

This is a perfect example of a principle we teach all the time: your fundraising will be more successful if you go deep on one specific part of what your organization does (in this case the power of a box of food) instead of listing all of the things your organization does.

From the Donor’s Point of View

Here’s the thing: to your donor, a letter like this feels like your organization is focused. To your donor, this feels like you are showing her exactly what she can do to have the largest, most powerful impact.

To your donor, that’s really attractive.

Sure, it might still feel a bit repetitive to you. It might even feel a skosh repetitive to a donor who reads the whole thing – but remember that most donors won’t read the whole thing!

So. There are two reasons effective fundraising writing is so repetitive:

#1 – The more people read and hear something, the more likely they are to think it’s true and important.

So when you repeat words/phrases/ideas like “your help is needed today” and “your gift made a big difference” in your fundraising, your donor is more likely to believe them. And then she’s more likely to take action.

Here’s the science:

Repeated statements are perceived as more valid than novel ones, termed the illusion of truth effect, presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity. In 3 studies … participants with low or high motivation to process information were presented persuasive arguments seen once or twice. In all 3 studies, repetition increased the persuasiveness of weak and strong arguments when little processing of message content occurred.

— From the Abstract to “The impact of repetition-induced familiarity on agreement with weak and strong arguments.” By Moons WG, Mackie DM, and Garcia-Marques T.

#2 — Most people don’t read the whole thing.

Most donors quickly scan your letter or email; they don’t read all of it.

So the savvy fundraising writers and creators make their fundraising more repetitive to increase the chance that your scanning donor sees it.

Take a look at this heatmap of a direct mail letter. The green shows the locations that the readers spent time on:

Now does it make sense that pro writers repeat the main message at the beginnings and ends of their letters and emails?

And does it make sense that the classic nonprofit letter – a letter that buries the Ask about 2/3 of the way through the letter – doesn’t work as well? Many of your donors never even see it!

Taking My Own Medicine

I’ve been writing about the power of “repeating” and being repetitive all month.

It’s beginning to feel repetitive…

But I’m taking my own medicine. I know that when something feels repetitive to me, that means it’s just starting to get through to my readers.

That’s the same advice I give to nonprofits every week: “I know it feels repetitive to you, and that means it’s getting through to your donors. Because it’s your donors’ reaction to your fundraising that matters most, not yours!”

Please do read our posts this month on “repeating.” Especially if you’re with a small- to medium-sized nonprofit. It’s not sexy, but the idea of repeating your best content, repeating your best tactics, and repeating your best messages is a powerful key to raising more money!

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Instant Appeals & Reports

Want us to create your appeals and newsletters for you? Want your staff to be able to work on other things while a team of professionals - who write and design these things all day every day — makes your appeals and newsletters work better than you thought possible? Here's what we'll take off your plate:

We’ll run a Kickoff meeting for each appeal and newsletter

We’ll write a Creative Brief defining exactly what will be said and how it will be said

We’ll write the letter, newsletter, and email

We’ll design the letter and newsletter. We’ll use your template for emails

We’ll request the mailing list and calculate the gift ask amounts

We’ll get the files ready to go to the printer

You’ll have offloaded 90% of the work – and your fundraising will raise more money!

Fill out the form below to begin the conversation! Or click here to read more.